Monday, January 09, 2012

New and Noteworthy---Bloody Sabbath Before Antietam: How Did The Confederates Remember The Battle of South Mountain?

An Interview with Brian Matthew Jordan, author of Unholy Sabbath: The History of South Mountain in Memory and History, September 14, 1862

Unholy Sabbath is the first, complete, full-length published study on the South Mountain battle (September 14, 1862). Brian Jordan recently discussed his book with Lindy Gervin of Savas Beatie LLC.

LG: The Confederates remembered the battle differently, didn’t they?

BMJ: Yes they did. The real meaning and import of the fighting suffered from the active postwar revisionism of its Rebel participants. Confederates had little desire to remember a battle in which the Federals wrestled away the higher, better ground from an army that had never been driven from the field, and in doing so, score an unprecedented victory that changed the course of the entire campaign by disrupting General Lee’s plans completely. There was much more romance in the story of an exhausted, barefoot army boldly striking north across the Potomac River, fighting it out against a larger and better equipped Army of the Potomac at Sharpsburg, standing on the field all the following day, and then making an organized (but not demoralized) retreat back to Virginia. South Mountain was a problem for the Confederates to overcome historically speaking, but the remedy was ready-made in the Lost Cause mythology, which I explain in the last chapter of Unholy Sabbath.

CWL: The entire interview is found at Libri Novus, the newsletter of Savas Beattie Publishing.

5 comments:

As a Historian who works at South Mountain in both Maryland and Pennsylvania, I am looking forward to reading this book. South Mountain is a battle that is overshadowed by the much larger Battle of Antietam. The Battle of South Mountain in my opinion is the changing point of the Maryland Campaign both socially and politically.

Thank you for mentioning our book, Unholy Sabbath. If you would like more information about the book, including an excerpt, or its author, please check at http://tinyurl.com/3tme26b.Savas Beatie LLCPublisher of Historical Titles of Distinctionwww.savasbeatie.comhttp://www.facebook.com/savasbeatie

Thank you for mentioning our book, Unholy Sabbath. If you would like more information about the book, including an excerpt, or its author, please check at http://tinyurl.com/3tme26b .Savas Beatie LLCPublisher of Historical Titles of Distinctionwww.savasbeatie.comhttp://www.facebook.com/#!/savasbeatie

Let's stay in touch. As a reenactor with the Pennsylvania Reserve Division of the Army of the Potomac.I would be please to support preservation efforts of the South Mountain battlefield and other South Mountain preservation efforts. Are you an acquaintance of John Hoptak? He is a ranger at Antietam NPS and has a book on South Mountain with History Press.